ylee

>Yes, there is still a last bastion of focus, productivity and anti-distraction. It's the terminal, which is why I find myself using TUI apps more and more as time goes on.

Welcome to the club. I've been using Emacs for more than a quarter century, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)

* does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.

* sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser

* opens images and attachments

* auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient

* archives messages to various folders using various criteria

* searches my archived mail going back a quarter century at lightning speed

Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.

VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

Consider the Power Macintosh 6100, in 1994 among the first three PowerPC-based Macs: <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Power_Ma...>

What happens when you push the eject button on the lower right, below the floppy drive? If you say "Ackshually, it's the power button. Macs don't have floppy eject buttons", feel free to go back in time and tell that to the many, many, many users at my college who pushed that button to eject the floppy and instead turned the computer off. This happened so often that we had to tape paper barriers over the buttons.

Computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. I majored in history and Spanish in college while working for the university's Unix systems group. My computer skills got me my first job out of college, in an investment bank's tech equity research group; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof.

I'm glad, for the sake of civilizational and economic progress, that others are able and willing to program for pay. Meanwhile I will continue to putter around with Elisp at home.

>Three men developed and created the Cheers television series: Glen and Les Charles ("Glen and Les") and James Burrows, who identified themselves as "two Mormons and a Jew."

I served my LDS mission in Nevada. One day, while tracting, we knocked on the door of the Charles brothers' parents. One of the sons' Emmys sat on the cable box on the TV.

> So, not so much that Ivy League athletes out earn their peers, but that they are more likely to prioritize money and choose careers that pay more in the first place.

I have only read the abstract, but does the paper control for networking? (Is that even possible? I presume by "resume data" the authors mean LinkedIn, but surely they mean individual profiles; I doubt they persuaded every single Ivy graduate to reveal linked profiles.) It's well known that Ivy League athletic teams are very effective referral networks for jobs, and that Wall Street is always a popular destination.

That said, I am an Ivy League graduate who did not play a sport in school. I learned after the fact that among those I had beaten out for my first job, at an investment bank's technology group,[1] was an Ivy League QB who had transferred from a Division I school. (I'd even read about him in the Wall Street Journal.)

I am an immigrant and my family had zero connections to Wall Street. I still don't know how I did it.

[1] Not the IT department

>Presumably you're also paying a tens of dollars a month premium on your cell plan (compared to an equivalent "sim only" plan) which is subsidising that?

You presume wrongly. As I said:

>I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile

I pay $20 total, including tax, for three unlimited 5G lines: One Kickstart version 1 line—for which $20 would be a bargain alone—and two free additional lines that Sprint/T-Mobile has offered since signing up.

>If Apple hadn't been an AT&T exclusive in the US and had adapted to the way people bought phones independent of carriers in most of the world, Android wouldn't have had a chance.

I disagree. Even had iPhone been available from all major US carriers on day one, and quickly launched outside the US in à la carte form, none of that would have made it affordable to most of the world. Cost is the major differential between Apple and Android (bar one or two flagship brands), not whether the carriers in a given country tend to be postpaid or prepaid or offer phones on an installment plan.

Would Apple love to have the same market share that it enjoys in the US/UK/Switzerland in the rest of the world? Yes. Would it do so by introducing $99 iPhones? No. Apple just does not play in the lowest-cost price segments, period. It didn't in 1977 with Apple II, in 1984 with Mac 128K, in 2001 with iPod, etc. Lower-priced computers, yes (such as Mac Classic in 1991). But Apple has never, ever served the lowest-priced segments that Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo did and do serve as part of their comprehensive product strategies. Two more examples from my time on Wall Street:

* I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to". Yes, yes, you can today get the previous-gen MacBook Air at the lowest base configuration for that price, and adjusting for inflation the price is significantly lower than $799 15 years ago, but the $799 computer's equivalent today is a $400 HP laptop.

* Dell, HP, etc. serve all price points because they feel like they have to, but that doesn't mean they like it. Around the same time as the above, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".

The funny thing is that iPhone really is not that much more expensive than Android (excepting the aforementioned $99 street price models) if you pay attention, but the environment has to allow it. Even if the two-year contract has mostly gone away in the US, postpaid is what allows huge discounts for the savvy. I paid $200 plus tax for my iPhone 13, which I bought through Sprint when it was the current model, merely by trading in an iPhone 8 that I had bought used from Sprint a year earlier for $100. That $200 is paid in $6.67 installments over 30 months (I don't mind, since I have basically the world's greatest phone plan through Sprint/T-Mobile). Such a program just isn't available without a postpaid carrier model to subsidize it, and postpaid in turn seems to be only economically viable in wealthier countries.

Not just BlackBerry. The entire phone industry was caught flatfooted by iPhone.

I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announcement in January 2007, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into the iPhone Hurricane.

>Although I have my own domain for some mail, I've been using pobox.com for this and other reasons since 2009. It's quite cheap and safe redirect since it now belongs to fastmail.

Same, both in owning my own domain name and using pobox.com. Customer since 1996 and primary email address since 1999 because my college address closed at graduation. Since then my email has been hosted at ISPs, at various other providers, and at a Google Apps site, but it doesn't matter because the pobox address never changes. My college address works again, but I've long since used the pobox address in too many places to mass migrate away.

Years ago, before it got "corporatized", Pobox's FAQs had one entry that went something like:

Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?

A: How do we know you'll be? Ha, didn't think of that, did you?

When I covered IT hardware companies on Wall Street, I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".

Around the same time, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".

I had just joined a large investment bank and was in NYC for training when I heard that the XPrize flight had succeeded. Although finance has been my career, I grew up wanting to be an astronaut and closely follow space science. I also expected that suborbital manned tourism flights would become routine, and that in time SpaceShipOne and similar designs would be scaled up to reach orbit.

Although the latter didn't happen, I am glad that SpaceX came along and made reusing (!) rockets that land at their own launch pads (!!) routine. It is not impossible that I will someday ride Starship or a descendant to orbit.

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.

While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

>Abstraction solves a lot of hard problems, but it is also costly.

This may explain what happened to me. Of the various standardized tests that I have taken in life (SAT in 8th grade, SHSAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GMAT), the LSAT is the only one that I did not score in the 99th percentile on, and its logic games section was my weakest. I have never had any test prep training of any kind other than taking old exams; if I had taken an LSAT class perhaps I might have approached the section differently.

>Nothing like "coding, the hobby".

I can relate; I chose Wall Street (the finance side, not the IT side) and now work for myself. While I used and use my tech skills every day, I have never wanted to write code for money. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>

When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>

Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>

I am self-taught with computers in the sense that I read every computer book I could find before my first computer at the age of 10, a Commodore VIC-20; everything else came from that. Elementary-school classes on Logo, AP Computer Science in high school, and one one-credit Java class in college are the extent of my formal education in computer science. I've never worked as and have never wanted to be a professional programmer.

I worked through Columbia doing user support for the university's Unix systems group. I got a job on Wall Street like many classmates, but for which the hiring person (an equity analyst covering software companies) was specifically looking for a CS major; I was able to demonstrate that I had the equivalent background thereof.

I have been successful with computers because I enjoy working with them. I enjoy computers because it's a hobby, albeit one that has affected my entire working life. I suspect that I would not enjoy computers as much were it actually my job. Since it isn't, I have the freedom of being able to (for example) write Elisp[1] to improve VM, the Emacs-based email client I've used for almost three decades. While I may contribute my code back to the VM project someday, meanwhile I report to no one and have no deadlines other than my own. That's freedom.

[1] I well remember the epiphany the day in Logo class I realized what recursion is. I still feel like giggling when I find an Elisp task for which recursion is an effective solution.

I've been using Emacs for more than a quarter century, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading.

I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)

* does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.

* sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser

* opens images and attachments

* auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient

* archives messages to various folders using various criteria

* searches my archived mail going back a quarter century at lightning speed

Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.

VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

I've been on Usenet since the 1990s. All those terminally online who claim that Trump (and Dubya before him) "ruined America's reputation abroad" are, of course, idiots. The online left back then hated the just as much as today.

>I had to use Macs in college. They crashed just as bad as the PCs.

I also used Macs a lot in college, and had the same experience. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but pre-Unix MacOS's own failings made things that much worse for using the emerging WWW.

>Enter OS X. On first boot my first thought was, "This is a NeXT with the dock rotated 90º clockwise" I was less wrong about that than I expected.

I also used (and liked) NeXT machines in college, but not nearly as often as the other platforms; by the time I got to them, they had been relegated to running helpdesk-client software.

I first tried out OS X in 2003. I've been using Linux at home since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

(I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)

I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announcement in January 2007, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into the iPhone Hurricane.

My salary as a first-year analyst at Goldman Sachs in 1999 was $40K. In 2000, to compete with dotcom companies, salaries rose to $55/65/75K for first/second/third-year analysts.[1] The compensation scale remained despite the dotcom bubble bursting.

[1] All figures exclude bonus, which is a huge part of compensation on Wall Street.

In the US, CS departments are about 50/50 spinoffs of math departments and spinoffs of EE departments; how do the latter fit into this?

Quoting my 2019 message to the cctech mailing list:

---- Adam Thornton says:

> The genealogy of Computer Science departments (and their curricula) (at least in the US) is also weird and historically-contingent. Basically it seems to have been a tossup at any given school whether it came out of the Electr[ical|onic] Engineering department, in which case it was memories and logic gates and a bottom-up, hardware-focused curriculum, or out of the Mathematics department, in which case it was algorithms and complexity analysis and a software-focused curriculum.

Yes, I've noticed the same thing. Example: Harvard's CS department is originally from the math side, while MIT's is from EE (thus today's EECS).

Berkeley = EE

Brown = Math

BYU = Math

Caltech = EE

Columbia = EE

Cornell = Operations research, math

Dartmouth = Math

Illinois = Math

NYU = Both (because Polytechnic developed its own CS program long before NYU acquired it to regain an engineering school)

Penn = EE

UCLA = OR (probably because of the RAND heritage)

Caltech until very recently did not formally offer CS degrees; students received degrees in Engineering and Applied Science, with a focus on CS (or aeronautics, or civil, or ME).

Illinois is an example of a track we might call "other" or even "defense". With government funding the university built its own computers (including ILLIAC and PLATO), and the group that did so became the CS department, but the undergraduate CS program began within the math department. Harvard's and Penn's programs might also qualify.

Undergraduate CS degrees are BA (Example: Harvard), BS (Example: Penn), or both (Example: Columbia). At Penn one must be an engineering student to major in CS. At Columbia one can major in CS in either the liberal arts or engineering schools, but with different curriculums. At Yale there is one undergraduate school, within which one can receive a BA or BS in CS, with different curriculums. Cornell, Northwestern, and Berkeley offer CS in their separate liberal arts and engineering schools; undergraduates receive BA or BS degrees with identical CS curriculums, with only other requirements differing.

I've read that medical schools are good at teaching either pharmacology (drugs), or pathology (diseases); perhaps this is also because of the expertise/specialty of their early faculty members.

I wrote the below in 2006. <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754>

>I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).

>It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.

Obviously I didn't know that there indeed soon would be another bubble in SF, this time a social media-driven one.

>I only use Google as a secondary account now

I've never had Google as a primary email account. I do have a few Gmail accounts, but that was to reserve them with my name, as opposed to ever giving the addresses out.

>I use pobox.com to forward my primary domain

Customer since 1996 and primary email address since 1999 because my college address closed at graduation. Since then my email has been hosted at ISPs, at various other providers, and at a Google Apps site, but it doesn't matter because the pobox address never changes. My college address works again, but I've long since used the pobox address in too many places to mass migrate away.

Years ago, before it got "corporatized", Pobox's FAQs had one entry that went something like:

Q: How do I know you'll be around in the future?

A: How do we know you'll be? Ha, didn't think of that, did you?

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.

While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

I am self-taught in the sense that I read every computer book I could find before my first computer at the age of 10, a Commodore VIC-20; everything else came from that. Elementary-school classes on Logo, AP Computer Science in high school, and one one-credit Java class in college are the extent of my formal education in computer science. I've never worked as and have never wanted to be a professional programmer.

I worked through Columbia doing user support for the university's Unix systems group. I got a job on Wall Street like many classmates, but for which the hiring person (an equity analyst covering software companies) was specifically looking for a CS major; I was able to demonstrate that I had the equivalent background thereof.

I have been successful with computers because I enjoy working with them. I enjoy computers because it's a hobby, albeit one that has affected my entire working life. I suspect that I would not enjoy computers as much were it actually my job. Since it isn't, I have the freedom of being able to (for example) write Elisp[1] to improve VM, the Emacs-based email client I've used for almost three decades. While I may contribute my code back to the VM project someday, meanwhile I report to no one and have no deadlines other than my own. That's freedom.

[1] I well remember the epiphany the day in Logo class I realized what recursion is. I still feel like giggling when I find an Elisp task for which recursion is an effective solution.

>On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year.

As one among your customer base for both versions, indeed. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.

>a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs.

That makes sense, both from an attractive-new-startup view (I'm sure many within Apple c. 1997 was pushing for a small, inexpensive Apple PDA to respond to Palm), and from a familiar-feeling-OS view.

>So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.

I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it (as mentioned above), but OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

(I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)

>The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college)

I don't think my college ever deployed NeXTs in public student labs the way it did deploy HP workstations <https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macinto...>, but I did use them in college as well. I still think NeXTStep did UI better than MacOS pre- or post-Unix.

>There were similar articles when Apple launched the iPhone exclusively on AT&T. We can clearly see now that a) Apple had no interest in controlling the network provider (many people thought they would eventually launch their own MVNO or even network)

I helped cover AAPL at a large investment bank. I can confirm the above; we thought that if there was any company with the a) financial resources to build its own network (an MVNO is much cheaper, of course), and b) brand presence/credibility to immediately gain market traction, it was Apple.

>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language).

Hacker News discussion of BYTE's special Logo issue: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556>

>In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life!

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.

While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

While learning Logo in elementary school, the moment I understood what recursion is.

While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.